I want to bet that for the thirty hours I played this game, half of that time I have been staring at my little arrow on my map view as I explore new areas. I get the lazy man's build (summoner, yay) and just parade through the monsters as I explore every undiscovered area.

Now this is exactly my problem. If I play a game, I would enjoy it if my most important information can be found on the main screen, and not in some submenus. Sure, the minimap exists, but I find that I can see way too little of the entire area with it. I would enjoy it if I could alter the zoom of the minimap, so I can see the areas I missed from further away, while still on the hunt for monsters and loot. I don't even want to think of how many hidden areas I missed because my eyes were stuck in the map screen.

Which is how it's meant to be. You should be exploring, seeing what you can find, not concentrating on the mini-map. If you explore everywhere, you'll find everything: monsters, loot, quests, hidden areas, etc. The map is just to help you out a bit, not hold your hand - for one thing some places spawn randomly so aren't in the same location every time you play.

And yeah, I forgot to say welcome to the game and the forum. Glad you joined us.

__________________You must be swift as the coursing river
With all the force of a great typhoon
With all the strength of a raging fire
Mysterious as the dark side of the moon.

If I understand the issue correctly, I think he is saying that he needs to pop the main map so often because the visible area of the minimap is so limited.

I have also found this to be an issue. As the visible in-game terrain is sometimes deceptive for paths, I will often use the minimap in combat or when otherwise rapidly moving. I use a controller and must micromanage my path, unlike mouse movement where the pathfinding AI will calculate this out most of the time.

Before I became fairly intimate with the zones, I would have to pop the main map all the time in order to not go the wrong way or get stuck on something just out of the minimap's range.

The minimap is GD's way of avoiding map overlay/offset, I think. Imho it should have the capacity for zoom or an increase in the visible area.

The mini-map was already present in the game engine since TQIT has the same and Medierra decided not to have map overlays.

Quote:

Originally Posted by medierra

The decision to not have a translucent overlay like D2 was actually a deliberate one. It was influenced by my own experience playing D2. There was a point where I realized I wasn't really having that much fun anymore with D2 and I started to wonder why that was - was I just getting sick of the game finally? Eventually it dawned on me that I wasn't having that much fun because I wasn't even really paying attention to the game. I would just constantly focus on the mini-map and not even really look at what was going on during combat. I found that when I turned the map off or at least minimized it I started having a lot more fun again.

I think there is a struggle with games between efficiency and fun / immersion. I feel that being able to play effectively with a large version of the map over the screen comes at the expense of fun.

You might say - why not leave that up to the player? Well, the problem is that most players, when they find themselves in a situation like I did in my experience with the D2 auto-map, won't stop and wonder why the game got less fun, they'll just stop playing.

This is one of those really difficult issues where it is hard to know for certain what the right answer is but my gut instinct is that this would be bad.

This is one of cases things where they probably should have left it up to the player.

Because there is nothing less enjoyable than seeing what looks to be a passage or room to move on the screen, yet is not when you try to move through the area. The walkable paths are mostly obvious on the minimap, however.

For me. it was looking like it might be a battle game-killer to be getting stuck in enclaves that initially looked to be passable...from how the environmental objects were placed. I resorted to tedious scouting of the walkpaths before many tough fights. Many of these battle areas were large enough to be outside of the minimap's limited view and in some cases I would have to look at 4 or 5 complete minimap coverages and compare the terrain visual against the minimap paths. Quite important when your character can kite but not face-tank.

And that convinced me to have one eye on the minimap at all times. The beautiful environment design is wonderful for exploring but horrible for blockages when fighting.

I think they'll see some more of this frustration with the console version. The mouse pathing does avoid this issue to some extent, so I can see why Crate might have been swayed by Madierra's opinion, initially.

This is something I was thinking about the other day, I'm someone who frequently hits M while playing to make sure i'm not running into a dead end. I've explored everywhere already, i just think it would be nice if i could zoom the mini-map out so i don't have to hit M so often.